Today’s little adventure started with the usual – this time it was my mother trying to figure out where this pretty bridge she kept seeing on FaceBook was located. It claimed to be in Pittsfield Maine, the town she grew up in, but she had no recollection of it. This isn’t unusual for my mother…. she’s the sweetest woman you’ll ever meet but she has the attention span of a gnat. On several occasions in the past I had to inform her her cousins were the offspring of her aunt who she swore up and down was a childless spinster. And so it goes… A week of speculation on a bridge…
As it turns out there is indeed a snow mobile bridge in Manson Park, right past the center of town. It claims to be the longest pedestrian suspension bridge over the river but I can’t for the life of me figure out if it has a name or who put it there. Oh well! The mystery continues!
I have been to Manson Park many times over the years, always during the big Egg Festival. It’s a really nice park with a full baseball diamond (complete with dug out) a public swimming pool, several play ground type areas, some scenic picnic spots near the river, and lots and lots of open space to run wild and free on. Honestly this park is better than most city parks I have seen. STILL, I had no idea what this whole damn bridge debate was about so I herded my mother in the car and off we went.
I parked in the lot aside the river and it didn’t take me long at all to locate the bridge. I could see it, though I was uncertain how to get there, I knew I could because there were two women sitting out there chillin’. I walked alongside the river until I couldn’t anymore and found a footpath through the grass not far away which led into the woods and onto the bridge.
THIS BRIDGE IS MENTAL. No seriously, it’s proper scary. It’s a long suspension bridge weighted down on both sides by trees. Trees which, mind you, had grown in the past 30+ years and who were literally being slowly cut down by the wires… This DIY Maine engineering is common out here but always scares the crap out of me. Getting onto the bridge was no better. It swayed and swung in the breeze, lurching back and forth and wobbling heavier with every step. The two women chilling noticed us walking out and they walked off…. they probably know something we don’t. By the time I got to the sections that were missing boards I was more than a little unnerved. If you’ve ever seen the video of Galluping Gertie, this is her little sis in the backwoods of Maine. I find it hard to fathom this is a snow mobile bridge. I sure as hell wouldn’t drive over it! The graffiti was also amusing, reading, “Lesbian tendencies ur fucked.” Seeing as the bridge doesn’t appear to have a name I think I’ll call it the Lesbian Bridge from here on out because I think it’s good to be sex positive, especially out in the boonies…
All that being said it was gorgeous! And attached to a trail on either side which led god knows where… I made my way up to the train tracks before turning around… 85 degree weather will put a damper on anyone’s desire to explore! All and all this was totally worth it… if not just to be grateful for being alive…
Since I was already in the area cooing at my submersible friends at 
I don’t think there’s anyone reading this blog that has done so since the very beginning, back when it was called Chasing Marbles, not Catching Marbles, but if you have you’d know that one of the very first stops I took before going cross country was a little salt water shop in Fairfield Maine called AquaCorals. I was so new to blogging I didn’t even have a camera! So I decided to go back and see what my macro lens could do and see how it was going.
Also I brought some friends, who wanted to come along and see what the hell I was talking about…. trained fish…. We were warmly welcomed and my crew got quite an education! From filtration, to healthy bacteria, to end of life fish care, the shop owner was happy to share. She also let us see her trained fish do a couple tricks, swooshing from side of the tank to the other and twirling on command. I smiled. One of the trained fish was a Yellow Tang, much like the one who died on me a few years ago and took piece of my heart with him. RIP Mr. Yellow. It was a very lovely trip down memory lane, back to when I was into all this stuff. Now I came only with a camera and a smile but you know what? It was super relaxing and a wonderful way to spend an otherwise unbearably hot afternoon. I even made peace with an old enemy – the starfish. Starfish really freak me out but the feather star I found there was actually pretty charming!
I went through the whole shop, which for Maine is quite extensive. She had some very beautiful corals, all super healthy, and the fish were bright and rambunctious as well. Sadly the fish didn’t like my camera much and hid and the corals were lit with a lighting my camera wasn’t used to so most of the photos came out crazy blurry. Moral of the story? I’m a shitty photographer. Just kidding, the moral of the story is I should really go back and try again with a regular lens… or read the manual and figure out what I am doing wrong…. but who does that?
After taking as many photos as my heart desired I returned to gaze upon some very vibrant zooanthids and talked for a while longer. I asked if she had any mantis shrimp knocking about which is a bit like going to a sheep farm and asking where the wolves are at but I can’t help what my heart desires! And I do love mantis shrimp! Despite the fact they are 
Well! As it turns out there’s a bunch of things going on in Maine I should really be up here for so last Thursday I packed up my car and braved five hours of dragon’s breathe (fog) to get to central Maine. I’ll be up here for a couple weeks…. getting into trouble and whatnot. So far it’s been wonderful. I took a photo of the dragon’s breathe and a new friend I found in the yard this morning. I’m calling him Tom.
Today’s little adventure was to a Steampunk Craft Fair and Festival in Dexter. For those of you not in the know Dexter is a tiny town smack dab in the middle of nowhere and a damn strange place to have such a thing…. which is obviously what made me want to go. It’d either be amazing, or amazingly bad, either way I’m happy! So off I went! (I was however not ballsy enough to attend the costume party at the adjoining bar the night before… Not that I had anything to wear on such short notice.)
I must say it is HOT and MUGGY today… and the little festival in the middle of the parking lot around the old factory building. TO my surprise there were a lot of people dressed up! Most were vendors, and the live music, but I think a few were just nutballs like me. I wasn’t totally dressed down – I did wear my octopus shirt which looks very Jules Verne-esque. And someone did compliment it… I think he was trying to say it looked like Cthulhu.
Anyway, I was happily surprised with the diversity here. There were a lot of crafters, a lot of gears, a lot of keys, all glued on masks, tiles, earrings, you name it. Even talked to one young woman making her own chainmail. Seriously. Hand-made chain mail. I asked where the hell she picked up that skill…. she said her school taught it. Wow. Maybe if my school were that interesting growing up I wouldn’t have prayed so hard for the building to “blow down in one good gust,” as one of the teachers lamented, “That’s all it’d take! One good gust!”
Of course I also went in the hopes of seeing local authors. I wasn’t disappointed. I ended up buying three books, all signed, for $35. One was a collection of short stories, another was some sort of whimsical fiction, and the third was a graphic novel which I am not known for buying but it looked so damn detailed… the woman who inked and wrote that one said she was used to doing comic con type circuits, indoors. I could see that. Everyone was super friendly and very passionate, what I would hoped to find in such a gathering. For the dead center of Nowheresville Maine I think this was pulled off pretty well! Especially for the first year in doing this. Maybe next year I’ll return as a vendor!
Recently I decided I should start going to more extroverted places on the weekend, maybe quirky little mom and pop shops, museums, or festivals, leaving my more isolated hikes into the woods or cemeteries for weekdays. There’s always more things to share about New England after all! Every time I feel like I have scraped the bottom of the barrel I always find way more! And so it was that a few days ago I got a fantastic lead – the Tiny House Fest in Brattleborro Vermont, an annual event right dead in the center of this adorable little Vermont town filled with vendors, educational lectures, and thirty tiny houses from all over the country. You could visit the vendors and walk for free, pay $15 to go on a self guided tour of the tiny houses, or pay $25 and have access to all that plus the lectures going on all day in three separate areas. Since this is a subject of great interest to me I splurged on educating myself. $25 and some gas for Daisy, off we go!
My mother decided that morning she wanted to go with me, which is fine, I did ask if she wanted to accompany me as she loves the tiny houses too. It was supposed to have intermittent thunderstorms and downpours all day, which I think kept the faint of heart away. Not me! I struggled to find parking because I am not familiar with Brattleborro and ended up going into town around noon when most of the festival goers were also seeking parking. So I drove up and down main street, in my heavily Sharpied car, probably about five times before I figured out what I was doing and found a suitable parking space. It’s Vermont. My crazy car and neon orange hair barely lift an eye brow here (which is probably why I adore the area so much…) Of course the second I pull in it starts to POUR. I mean hurricane level rain, washing people down the hills… SIGH. I got out, pulled up my hoodie, handed my mother the umbrella, and tried to pay for my space. The machine had other ideas and would not accept my card, or my mother’s. I had to go back to the car, drenched, and rustle around for change. Thank God it was cheap. Thirty cents an hour. Now that’s a price I didn’t mind paying!
Off I went. We first toured all the tiny houses and it was an impressive assortment I must say. Some were just shells, some were completely tricked out, some were built onto trailers, some were in buses and vans, and some were big enough to feel like actual normal houses. The innovation was wonderful! People formed polite ques outside of each and poked in with the same burning curiosity I had. Often the makers of these homes stood somewhere along the way and spoke to people who may have had questions. Several of them I was really impressed with.
From here I attended a few lectures. I learned about a crazy variety of things: the many uses of pee, how to garden under solar panels so that arable land isn’t wasted, how to bring a town back to life with “pop up” stores carried in vans, much about community organization, much about teaching others, as well as how people can live in a bus or a van, and an ungodly amount of information on the construction of a gypsy wagon styled travel home that had my eyes glassed over for the entire half an hour.
I wasn’t on it for long before I hit massive gridlock. There were cars sprawled out for miles and miles. A helicopter flew overhead and people started craning their necks out their windows to see my awesome doodle job on Daisy, which I had recently touched up an added to. She’s been in and out of the shop all winter and spring so this was my first outing with her in a long while. It was unfortunate as it was over 80 degrees that day, in full sun, and Daisy’s AC isn’t functional. I’d also left my water and phone charger in the Prius, having been accustomed to using that car in Daisy’s absence. As traffic ground to an absolute halt I found myself stuck, not for the twenty or so minutes I had expected, but for more than two hours. By this time I was suffering heat exhaustion. I was dizzy, nauseous, and soaked in my own sweat. To make matters worse I was bored because the CD player decided it was also overheated and stopped working along with the radio. I traveled only a little over a mile in those two hours and watched as everyone in a truck just drove over the grassy meridian and sped off in the other direction. My car is tough but too low to the ground for that. I was stuck until I finally made it to the Westford exit and was forced to take it, they had closed down the entire road ahead of me. So I drove into Westford, and the first thing I saw was a Panera’s, so I drove in and used their bathroom to cool down, taking a paper towel and soaking it in fresh cold water, splashing my face in their sink before returning to the counter and buying a smoothie and half a sandwich. I ate before stopping to consider where I was and what I should do. I didn’t want to find some ulterior way to the pet store, still being more than half an hour away, with the 495 still closed, but I was in the same area as a friend so I asked if I could drop by and maybe take a cold shower, when the answer was yes, I then decided I would make my trip out worth something by checking out a local trail I found on previous drives.
I ended up at the Tophet Chasm, travelling along their boundary trail, which was 3.3 miles. It was still well over eighty degrees but the shade of the trees was sufficient enough for me for quite a while. I had heard these woods were haunted and had some link to Native American religious rituals back in the day. I found the trail to be…. exceptionally ordinary. What they were calling a chasm just looked like an average wooded hill. There wasn’t anything particularly interesting on this trail, no weird plant life, no funny little birds, no amazing views. In fact the trail wound its way through the back borderlines of numerous private properties. Had I lived on one of them I might find this very neat, having traveled to hike, I found it… less than interesting. The only thing I found that amused me was a gargoyle placed near the trail by one such private residence that appeared to be waiting in ambush for hikers. Super cute!
By the second mile in I started to suffer heat exhaustion again and wanted nothing more than to be off it. I got super nauseous, dizzy, lethargic, and because the pollen count was so high (with the ground looking as if it had snowed yellow) I was getting some super pissed off sinuses starting to give me a headache on top of everything else. I trudged on. There was one view, at what I think was called Lookout Rock, near the end of the trail, that did in fact look over a good part of the town. It wasn’t amazing but ti was something! Onward I walked, melting… By the time I got back to the car I was sooo ready to be home. I drove to my friends house instead where my heat sickness escalated and I ended up pretty much downed for the next couple hours, trying to regain strength to drive home. Here I learned the traffic jam I found myself stuck in earlier had trapped some cars for up to four hours and was caused by a fire in the power lines. I’ve learned a lot of lessons from this. Always have water in the car. Don’t try to hike in the afternoon when the weather is in the 80’s. Check traffic reports.
About a week ago I was asked to do a group trip, which I am not adverse to, that would be somewhat local and appropriate to bring a four year old. So I thought the sculpture garden in Brookline might be the ticket. I had heard there were all sorts of large sculptures nestled in the woods on a series of hiking trails that ranged in severity, with most being “easy.” I had envisioned a college campus with a few winding trails around it.
Part of this group was my mother, whose alarm did not go off, and who spent $2 buying a muffin for breakfast that she first stepped on and then lost entirely. From here the GPS kept freezing and would not accept the address and we got lost from there. I was still pretty chill, just hanging in the back seat with the kiddo, which is something I very rarely do. Sadly the bickering had already started.
When we found the entrance to the sculpture garden it was a dirt road attached to the highway with the saddest little sign directing the way. The parking lot had a few gorgeous metal sculptures, some cars parked from other visitors, and a big old map. It said online I should print my own map so I did… not that it helped… because between the three of us no one could make sense of it. In fact the map I’d printed and the big one in the parking lot didn’t agree on much!
We started walking, ended up on what I think may have been a RV trail, climbing up, up, up and not seeing a damn thing. Everyone’s huffing and puffing and cranky. I’m at a complete loss as to what is going on. When we finally got to the top of the hill we found ourselves in a rat’s nest of insanely ill-marked trails that went off in all directions with colorful arrows pointing in every one of them. Most trails these days are color coded. These tried to be… but both the maps had different colors for the same trail and the trails themselves? Well! You’re walking on the purple, red, blue, green, yellow trail…. or is it white? No, I think it’s all of them. We’re on every trail at once. Absolute chaos. I felt like we might end up in Wonderland, or somewhere worse. Were Muppets changing the arrows every time we passed? Felt like it.
But then we started to see the sculptures. They were in fact littered everywhere and were for the most part marked on the map by color and number – not chronologically, or in any other order we could identify, and the colors seemed to mean absolutely nothing besides, but they were there! Look! Most of them were pretty abstract and not really my thing but a few were really cool like a big steam punk bank vault door just sitting in the woods all mysterious. I also adored two granite hugging couples, some Australian’s concept of a seed, a weird figure in a serpentine pose around a pole, and my favorite of all three beautifully whimsical werewolves made of scrap metal. And we did enjoy ourselves after the bickering settled down but seriously… this isn’t for everyone. If things like insanely poorly marked trails and unreadable maps bug you then perhaps you should make a pass on this. Even the “loop” trails were just big U’s that attached to other big U’s. Not a single complete loop. And the hiking was moderate – there were rocks and hills and slippery leaves. The four year old did great though so I still wouldn’t discount it completely as family fun…Â And hey, I did have a good time. Honestly. I think there’s something really cool about art in the woods, even more cool when you can go up to them and touch them, getting a real sense of the artist who made them.
